03 December 2012 3:43 PM

Freedom of the Press in Danger?

I’ll come back to this subject when I’ve got properly to grips with the enormous Leveson Report. But here are a few thoughts on the basis of what I’ve been able to gather. A lot of the press has been behaving very badly.

I have said here before that I did not, when I started work as a reporter and obtained my membership of the National Union of Journalists, imagine for one moment that I was joining the Sisters of Mercy. That didn’t mean we were all barbarians. Most of us thought we were doing some kind of good. In a way we did good simply by existing. Someone, somewhere, was afraid we might find out what they were up to. But perhaps we had different priorities.

In my early years in the trade, I read a lot of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe detective stories, and came to admire Marlowe’s cunning and his justified mistrust of authority, though I can’t imagine Lord Justice Leveson approving. I wasn’t, as a snotty graduate, quite so fond of the side of the business so wonderfully portrayed by Evelyn Waugh in ‘Scoop’ ( a manual, not a novel) when he described the three sordid old hacks ‘Shumble, Whelper and Pigge… [who] had loitered together on many a doorstep and forced their way into many a stricken home’. On the other hand, if I was strictly honest with myself, I knew that the bits of the paper I wrote were subsidised by the bits that Shumble, Whelper and Pigge wrote. They always have been and always will be.

Popular journalism, which doesn’t really exist in any other country but ours, is a form of showbusiness, mingled with information in which you must entertain if you wish to inform. It doesn’t need to be as rough as it got. I do think that the arrival of Rupert Murdoch needlessly vulgarised the popular papers.

It’s astonishing to visit the British Library’s newspaper archive (soon to leave its old home at Colindale) , and to look at ( say )the Daily Mirror of 50 years ago – the very high level of much of the writing, the density of the text, the restraint of the headlines – and it was selling four million copies a day. The mid-market papers of that time would make today’s Daily Telegraph look trivial and vulgar. As for the Telegraph of that time, I can still remember when it had triple-decker headlines, seemed to be mainly about the Second World War despite its having finished fifteen or so years before, with its indecipherable photographs and advertisements which explained the possible respectable use of chewing gum (though certainly not on the cricket field or the golf course). As for the Times, it really did put the assassination of President Kennedy on an inside page.

Anyway, the point is, we got carried away. We did wrong things. They were avoidable and matters of choice. And this has now come to a very abrupt stop. That is not just because of the many prosecutions now pending, about which I(quite rightly) can say nothing. Nor is it because of Lord Justice Leveson, whose inquiry was set up to get Mr Slippery out of a hole he had made for himself, through excessive closeness to the Murdoch empire, rather than because the need was specially urgent. It is because we have learned no end of a lesson. Of course, it doesn’t show as much as it might. We can’t put articles in the paper saying ‘This week we turned down the following or refused to pursue the following, because we are so much more careful than we were five years ago’.

In any case, justice and restitution for the victims (who in many cases were able to get such things through the existing law) is a different thing from placing permanent restrictions on the press. And the government is far more of a threat to most people than the press will ever be, with its secret courts snatching children, its cruel taxes on the old and poor, its fatal hospitals and stupid wars.

I don’t blame the McCanns or Christopher Jefferies for wanting to see the press punished (not that a weaker press will do them any good) . But I do blame politicians and other establishment person for exploiting this justified feeling. They are using the victims of the press, to get something they have long wanted anyway. I’m a First Amendment supporter, anyway, or would be if our constitution permitted such a thing. To me, regulating newspapers is like regulating the wind, foolish and unlikely to succeed. I think the press has enough regulators already – the readers who are free not to buy it, the businesses who are free not to advertise in it, the libel courts, the criminal law and the contempt rules (now, I’m glad to say, being properly enforced, as they weren’t for years) .

It’s not a monopoly – broadcasting and the Internet constantly undermine it. And I suspect that most of its political enemies are really motivated by a loathing of ‘the Right Wing Press’, that is to say the one major force in British public life which still stands up for social, moral and cultural conservatism. Regulation, as I’ve long stated here, is far more menacing to a free society than nationalisation, because government can appear to stand at arm’s length from it, and because it can be introduced into areas of life that the state could never previously have touched in a free, western society. If we have to have regulation, and for our transgressions it seems as if we must, then it is very important to me that the government has no hand in it.

How will it work? I’m not sure. Let’s see the legislation. I suspect that the vital battle, over the principle of state-underpinned regulation, is the one that really matters. Let them in and they will, by hook or by crook, increase their powers.

That interesting man, Mick Hume (Author of the newly published book ‘There is No Such Thing as a Free Press…and we need one more than ever’, has a specific worry which also concerns me, since many of the things I write annoy various lobby groups, who love to claim to be ‘offended’ or ‘insulted’ by legitimate expressions of dissenting opinion. He is worried about the ‘arbitration’ which (if I have this right) Sir Brian Leveson recommends in Chapter 7 of his conclusions , pp 1768 and 1769 (the whole thing is available on the web, and the conclusions are in Volume 4).

Mr Hume says : ‘One legitimate criticism of the press in the past has been a reluctance to publish corrections and apologies swiftly and prominently enough when mistakes are made. Leveson’s proposed ‘independent’ arbitration body would use that as an excuse to throw the press open to anybody with an axe to grind or a taste for self-publicity. ‘The arbitrator would hear complaints, not only from individuals alleging mistreatment, but from ‘representative groups’ and third parties who don’t like something they have seen or read. Expect a weekly list of complaints from lobby groups …. What is more, the hearings would be heard in the ‘inquisitorial’ style of a French court, where the judge simply hears the evidence, rather than the English adversarial system with its rigorous cross-examination of witnesses. The inquisitorial system was used during the hearings of the Leveson Inquiry itself, where tabloid-bashing witnesses were rarely cross-examined … …If the judge figure on the arbitration body sides with the complainant, the regulator will then have the power not only to order the publication of a correction or apology, but to determine how and where it should be printed in the paper. Are the front pages of our newspapers to be edited by judges rather than journalists in future?’

Well, when they come to consider the legislation, or the new body, I hope someone pays attention to that . Such a system, if Mr Hume has understood it aright, could kill off a lot of legitimate comment.

Comments

'The Press' has had centuries of self regulation, and all it has got us is an increasingly corrupt and dishonest pile of rags who calculate sales balanced against the cost of court action, destroy peoples lives for fun, lie outright to stir up hatred and tension, then hold their hands up in shock when their actions cause violence. You had decades in the 'last chance saloon' time to pay the cost of continuing contempt for peoples privacy, and simple human decency.

" I want bereaved mothers and pretty actresses to be able to live their lives free of intrusive journalism, and innocent men to be from from trial by media. But I also want the misdeeds of the Robert Maxwells and other creeps and parasites to be exposed."

Perhaps a little too much "I want" here, sir.
If, like me, you are a private citizen, it may be more conducive to a happy life to be less exigent and to be glad, if and when the authorities get things right.

As you say, if there were no demand for gossip, the media would cease to offer it but there are two problems with this.
Even the newspapers which publish gossip, sometimes also publish - I am told - decent crossword puzzles and secondly many people seem to me to have been so thoroughly persuaded - perhaps through long exposure at a formative age to television, aptly once called by Peter Hitchens the "third parent" - to adopt a more passive than active intellectual life.
In a democracy it is the tastes and preferences of the many which prevail over the tastes and preferences of the few. Those who live in democracies yet do not share the culture of the many are second-class citizens in all but name.

"The Press is either free, or it is not, and there seems to me to be no realistic middle ground. A free Press is also, in my opinion, vital if the population is to be free. But have you considered how much of the population now actually *wants* to be free? Freedom entails all sorts of awkward, inconvenient and difficult things, and I'm not sure how widespread the appeal of such things is in the Britain of 2012."

But you don't say from which things a 'free press' is to be free, sir. When certain principles of behaviour and speech were taken unexpressed for granted, it would hardly have been necessary to specify which things were proper, and which things were improper, subjects of a journalist's attention.
Nowadays however it seems to me that what not only the press but even private individuals are to be free to say or write needs to be specified , before expressions like "free press" have much discernible meaning.
The same goes, of course, for any supposed freedoms of individual citizens. It would be nice to be free from having what freedoms we still have left - such as the freedom not to vote in elections and the freedom not to buy newspapers or watch tv - further curtailed by the over-scrupulous moral préciosité of our rulers.
Perhaps they could be called 'inalienable rights' or something similar.
"You can fool all of the people some of the time" as Lincoln (I think it was) said "and you can fool some of the people all of the time; but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."
Those words should be carved in stone somewhere where no politician could avoid reading them

There was a time when even populist papers like 'The Daily Mirror' wrote seriously and in good English, they were vulgar certainly, but not the trashy comics with soft porn that they've become today. The blame for this must lie with Rupert Murdoch and I suppose it was too much to hope that the Mirror wouldn't try to play catchup with 'The Sun' as they scrambled to find the lowest common denominator to attract readers, even its editorials are written for illiterate idiots.

I am disturbed by the fact that, when a high profile murder is committed and someone is arrested, the next morning the press will have page after page detailing the alleged suspect's life. Surely, not so long ago, this would have been sub judice and the editors would soon be in court for contempt. It is the same when a major rail or plane crash occurs, the papers are full of analysis as to why it happened when nobody can possibly know at this early stage.

T am fed up with finding just about every story in a newspaper is labelled 'exclusive' when a quick scan of the newsagent's racks will show that it clearly isn't. I'm sure why they do this but it's irritating and dishonest.

I think the implementation of the Leveson proposals would be a disaster for Britain, but surely the real problem with British journalism (and western journalism in general) is not its "irresponsibility" but its oh so timid herd mentality?Such is the uniformity of most British media on most issues one has to wonder how much difference statutory regulation could make. They all sing from the same songsheet already anyway. The case of Jimmy Savile demonstrates what a ludicrous self-congratulatory delusion it is to believe the British press is "exuberant" and "reckless". When it comes to exposing the real establishment they're as jittery as rabbits, and that goes for everyone from the trashiest red-top to the pseuds in Guardian-land. With a few noble exceptions, such as PH and Henry Porter, no British journalist asked really hard questions when Blair was ripping up ancient freedoms on an almost daily basis. Likewise almost no one asked really hard questions about the Iraq farce or Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, etc. They've all been content to trot out the spin about tyrants "slaughtering their own people", whilst simultaneously ignoring the many atrocities committed by western allies and proxies in these conflicts. Journalists who don't report the misdeeds of both sides in a conflict are not journalists - they're hack propagandists. I've been struck also by how little interest the media have shown in the allegations of Edwina Currie and Rod Richards that a senior Tory of the Thatcher era, Sir Peter Morrison (now deceased), was a known paedophile. Surely the liberal left media in particular might have been expected to dwell on this story for weeks on end? Not a bit of it. It appears the whole media would prefer to leave certain rocks unturned for fear of what might emerge.

I think the issue is the destruction of innocent lives in pursuit of sales and shareholder profit and not harmlessly salacious 'tittle-tattle' or seaside postcard vulgarity. Things that make many or most of us simply squirm in disgust are in the last analysis only matters of taste in most instances. But the ruination of the innocent in serving up to the markets in trash - with us always - is another thing entirely.

You can satiate the blood-lusting, guillotine-watching mentalities that comprise the trash market perfectly adequately without recourse to plundering the privacy of perfectly decent people. Several American supermarket 'check-out' rags do this to everyone's satisfaction, or at least minimal disgust. Learn from them.

"Anyway, the point is, we got carried away. We did wrong things. They were avoidable and matters of choice. And this has now come to a very abrupt stop."

Oh they have, have they?

"…the Right Wing Press’, that is to say the one major force in British public life which still stands up for social, moral and cultural conservatism."

Oh they do, do they?

This would be amusing, coming from a man whose employers last month saw fit to publish pictures of a 14 year old girl under a headline which states she "shows off her womanly curves".

It would be amusing, if it weren't so disgusting.

When asked to comment on the matter, Mr Hitchens stayed silent.

If you believe Mr Hitchen's claims above - that his employer has abruptly stopped behaving badly, and that his employer stands up for anything (except how to make a profit by telling people what they want to hear) - you are deluded.

That might be so, but few would expect to find a moralising editorial in a trashy magazine.
The problem, so it seems to me, is that more attention is paid to attracting readers from all parts of society rather than staying in line with core beliefs - hence the charge of hypocracy when modern society is accused of being obsessed with the 'cult of celebrity'. A cult, I suspect, started by the national press long before trashy magazines devoted to the subject arrived on the scene.

Dear Mr Hitchens,
I and others have noticed the technique that the modern Left use as a matter of course to control debate. It is simple, and, when one understands it, it is extremely easy to spot arguments in which this technique is being used.

Essentially, their operational intention is to obtain a position where they can artificially increase their powers of control over the people they are supposed to be working for. The strategy is referred to as 'acting beyond one's authority'.

The most common mechanisms and their knee-jerk effects we are by now all familiar with, hence, wherever they are raised this strategy should be suspected as a prime motive.

Common arguing techniques to enable the arguer to exceed his authority ('privilege escalation attack' in computing parlance) include the citation of 'health and safety', 'anti racism' and 'protection of children'. The arguments, which usually pretend a level of innocence that the arguer does not posess, can usually be grouped under the heading of 'willful naivete'.

Acting beyond authority is a key skill taught by the Common Purpose 'charity', whose malign influence on British governance and life was so clearly exposed in the Mail's recent (excellent) set of articles by Richard Pendlebury, which alas have not yet been followed up, but clearly deserve to be.

Thank you for your reflections on Advent, they are much appreciated and needed.

"...‘the Right Wing Press’, that is to say the one major force in British public life which still stands up for social, moral and cultural conservatism."

Given that The Sun is notorious for Page 3, The Express is published by Richard Desmond and The Mail (on its website, at least - I do not buy the paper edition) makes a habit of featuring debauched, vacuous and often half-naked "celebrities" I am unsure of which elements of the press Mr Hitchens believes stand for social, moral and cultural conservatism. It is true that such outlets also publish conservative opinions but I think that conservatives who suggested they are defined by such values would be idealising them.

The British public do seem to have an inexhaustible faith in regulation. Why the government should be seen as more trustworthy in managing the affairs of the press than the press itself is an ongoing mystery to me. Measures like these can only have the effect of making both more untrustworthy in my opinion. But there seems to be no area of life that the public does not think can be improved by political interference. People nod in unison at the overall objectives of the regulation without considering the effects of practical implementation so that any objections are easily portrayed as an obstinacy to recognise the value of the original intent. Even the media itself seems complicit in this. If the press itself does not really want to be free then it shall most certainly not be however comfortable its arrangements.

Those who have waited 20 years in order to avenge the 1992 General Election result and everything that followed from it, not least the rise of Tony Blair, will not now be denied that vengeance by any power on earth. They massively predominate within one party, and they are still far more numerous than most people realised within the other party.

Or would you rather be given what you profess to want? The end of the distribution arrangements with the Post Office. And the abolition of the Lobby, so that you would all just have to watch BBC Parliament like everyone else. That is what independence of the State would mean.

"And finally, there would be no market for intrusive journalism if people didn't buy its results. I have heard very little criticism of the readers of the 'long lens' pictures, the people who drive the market."

I don't know how this gets solved, other than along the lines that child pornography has been tackled - by criminalising the consuming market. Where that ends up after years of sliding up this thickening wedge is anyone's guess. My guess is it ends up in totalitarianism. And yes, the cannabis market has been criminalised. But in the case of the cannabis market, and in virtually all cases of this kind, the criminalising is motivated by consumer interest rather than to effect source elimination.

"I wish we had a written constitution with a right to free speech like the Americans."

I think you'll find that American political journalists are way less cruelly slashing than British political journalists, the freedom to be so in our non-constitutional system much envied by many American journalists. The White House Press Corps may have something to do with this. If you do not generally cow-tow to the administration-in-being and say nice things you get ejected from the Corps, and few ambitious American political journalists see this as career enhancement. Those outside the White House Press Corps feed are never anywhere near anything worthwhile knowing and are therefore irrelevant.

The Press is either free, or it is not, and there seems to me to be no realistic middle ground. A free Press is also, in my opinion, vital if the population is to be free. But have you considered how much of the population now actually *wants* to be free? Freedom entails all sorts of awkward, inconvenient and difficult things, and I'm not sure how widespread the appeal of such things is in the Britain of 2012.

I'm a First amendment man too. I followed the Leveson enquiry with some interest and included an essay about it on a Kindle book I published which looked at what was wrong with Britain today. Certainly there were terrible stories before the enquiry about individuals who had been hounded by an intrusive press. Their names are well known: these people were in the public eye becuse of personal tragedies or celebrity. The law should, for example, have been able to prevent gangs of men chasing an actress through the street and spitting at her. Disgraceful that it was not.

However, I recall the glee with which the left liberal BBC picked up and reported all this. I thought to myself how much the BBC hated 'the right wing press' (its only main rival) and thought about biased news management.

As a long time Private Eye subscriber, I know the extent to which the rich and powerul are able and willing to use our oppresive libel laws to keep journalists away from their crimes. I want bereaved mothers and pretty actresses to be able to live their lives free of intrusive journalism, and innocent men to be from from trial by media. But I also want the misdeeds of the Robert Maxwells and other creeps and parasites to be exposed. I note with horror that there is said to be a majority of MPs in favour of statutory muzzling of the press.

How much of this is revenge for exposing their expenses scandal?

And finally, there would be no market for intrusive journalism of people didn't buy its results. I have heard very little criticism of the readers of the 'long lens' pictures, the people who drive the market.

I wish we had a written constitution with a right to free speech like the Americans.

I partly agree with Steve B's post (3/12/12 4:44PM) in which he attacks the so-called conservatism of the Mail, particularly "the constant stream of online pieces focussing on teenaged (often underaged) girls".

I have noticed that these aspects of the Mail (by which I mean the Daily Mail, Mail Online, and to a lesser extent the MoS) are very frequently brought up when someone wishes to criticise this branch of the media. But the criticism is actually about something else. The problem is not that the Mail prints this rubbish - notice that trashy magazines do the same thing and nobody cares. The problem is that the Mail prints other things: news that is inconvenient to the powerful, and commentaries that really are conservative. This can't be attacked directly without revealing an illiberal intolerance to other people's opinions and freedom of speech. So it's attacked indirectly, via the celebrity stories on the "sidebar of shame".

Therefore, I think it really is all about the "Right Wing Press", unconvincing and unconservative bogeyman though that may be. Whatever restrictions are imposed, they will hit hardest against the politically incorrect. The celebrity pictures are a deliberate distraction, and not the real issue (and in any case many of these are printed with the approval of the people concerned).

Well, to me it seems perfectlly sensible to leave it to those who will make the decisions. After all, it was Government that set up the report process and it will be politicians who debate it. Unless there are queries concerning lack of clarity, and from comments that I have heard from those on all sides, including the media, who have read the report, that is not the case. What more is he to say? You might not like his findings, but he is not making the decisions.

Mr Hitchens, what do you mean about the word of freedom; it would be interesting to know how you and others define freedom; freedom of what? We know that free speech is only allowed if it does not offend anyone with truth, facts and indeed views that do not please some people; who only adhere to what beliefs they want to. If you support equality for all, then the press should be controlled in what they say, like ordinary people are; as you are very well aware off. One cannot say that we are a democratic nation, on the grounds of who can define what democracy really is. You and your press leaders clearly know that our working people have no input in Law or in the House of Parliament and indeed not one once of input in the House of Lords; well under free speech and democracy that is. So I think that the press must be controlled by our un-democratic system that most voters want; on the grounds that if they want democracy they would not have voted for the three major parties that are certainly not democratic. By the way Mr Hitchens, does your paper company know what agenda stated that Mr Clegg was to give 12 million pound to a charity involved with his wife. I trust it was in their agenda to give to anyone they want to; but not the old people in poverty in this country; if we did not give 7 billion away; it would drag our old people and young children out of poverty, but sadly under democracy the voters do not want that.

Leveson seems to combine cowardice and arrogance in equal measure in his disappearance to Australia and refusal to debate the merits of his report with its opponents. But then this what you would expect from a judge and advertises the merits of keeping the judiciary out of politics.

A free press dependant on freedom of speech freedom of assembly .and freedom to resist ,with violence if required ,the sitting government, and or monarch.
And of course the biggy freedom from censorship. These freedom are just figments of fertile imaginations .
The press is bound to not descend into criminality , And as I said on a previous thread. They did , so must suffer the consequences. Whether those consequences involve lesser freedoms for the poplace., must be lain at their shoulder. No amount of wiggle room will assauge their guilt.
If as you say ALL output is controlled, by the editors or the owners , Then its a power that must be curtailed.

I think Simon Jenkins made a good point, a demarkation that hadn't occurred to me. Jenkins said the problem is you can't legislate on matters of ethics. You can make libel, phone-hacking and pornography illegal, but you can't make unethical behaviour illegal. To some extent you can legislate in matters of privacy and intrusion, but if the yellow press choose to destroy an innocent person's life in the quest for sales, then there is, notwithstanding the above, little that the law can do.

It's the same at the personal level. If you choose to be rude, you are free to be so provided it is not abuse proscribed by law. The thing to do is just avoid rude people. Decent people therefore don't read the yellow press. It is greatly regrettable that the broadsheets found it possible to pick up on the rubbishing of the lives of innocents and go with some of it themselves. Shame on them.

I don't know how to express this succinctly, only to field my impression that in what used to be the hallowed, and nowadays frequently discredited, 'old days' things were done and not done, and everyone knew what those things were. In modern times anything is done, and nothing that is not done.

As long as you and your countless colleagues are free to report/write, when necessary, criticism of ( without uncalled for personal intrusion ) those who think they have the power to rule over us when in fact they are public servants paid by the public (I mean the State, politicians and the police), then the Leveson Report is no more interest to me, although I helped finance it.

Very good article by Janet Dailey in this week's Sunday Telegraph, if you haven't read it.

"...I suspect that most of its political enemies are really motivated by a loathing of ‘the Right Wing Press’, that is to say the one major force in British public life which still stands up for social, moral and cultural conservatism".

He suspects wrong. I was in broad agreement right up until this sentence which ascribes to the right-wing press a nobility of cause it doesn't deserve.
Before Mr Hitchens points it out, yes I am aware he does not write for the Daily Mail. And I do not include him when I say I dislike the Mail (actually I think its a shame that he's associated with it and wish he simply had his own independent blog - how about it Mr Hitchens?). But dislike it I do, and not because it claims to stand up for conservatism. I dislike it because of some of repellent articles it has put its name to over the years (Jan Moir's Stephen Gateley article springing instantly to mind) and primarily because of the hypocrisy of the constant stream of online pieces focussing on teenaged (often underaged) girls, usually headed "all grown up", and photos of vaguely famous people in bikinis, or without makeup, or having gained or lost weight.

Its a sham. There is no social or moral "cultural conservatism" to see here - its as base, immoral and lecherous as the celebrities it takes a dislike to and trains its resources on. The "loathing" Mr Hitchens speaks of is not of a force that stands up for conservatism, but one that celebrates morons, sexualises the underage and attacks the deemed-to-be-unattractive. And is it "loathing", or just the reaction of decent people to shameful moral standards and double-standards?

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